If aliens really are out there, interacting with them is going to be difficult. It’s not that they’ll just speak a different language – it’s more that the very building blocks of communication themselves will probably be different. The sounds; the relationships between ideas; heck, the conceptual basis of words themselves – without a real-life babel fish , we’d basically be screwed.

Now imagine what their math would look like.

That’s basically how most mathematicians have regarded IUT, or “Inter-Universal Teichmüller Theory” – the weird, seemingly impenetrable system invented by Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki in 2012. It’s known as the “alien language” of math, so weird and complex that even the best minds around struggle to fathom it.

But now, it has a new translator – a

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